Piranha FX by Next Wave Automation

One of the great things about having the opportunity to go to woodworking shows is looking for cool new products. So I'm gonna take this opportunity to show you a product I've found at the recent show in Las Vegas, 2015 AWFS. It was a great show. Here's what I'm talking about. Benchtop CNC's like the Piranha FX, they've really come on strong in the woodworking marketplace. Don't take up a lot of space, benchtop. Not a lot of dollars invested here but really offer a lot of capabilities in their CNC function. What caught my eye with this product at the show was what Next Wave Automation has done here is taken the technology that's already driving a CNC and said, "Let's add some other stuff to that." The other stuff is a laser engraver and a 3D printer, which all is gonna fall under one roof here. So first, let's talk a little bit about the CNC part. The functions are all controlled here at this readout. So for instance, I can get to my home position. When I'm ready to run something on this, it's done by USB. Once we've got our flash drive in there, we can pick up the USB that shows us the files. Once we pick up the file, then we're good to go on the machine. With CNC, what we get from that is the ability to X, Y, and Z cut. X and Y are forward and back, left and right. Z is our vertical axis. And with that, we can do carving, we can cut all the way through pieces, so we can make parts right here on the benchtop CNC. I think that CNCs like this are really the wave of the future for woodworking. And what's really cool about these things, this is the kind of thing that's getting young people interested in woodworking again, because of the way that they can use a computer to manipulate the machine, to make their cuts. So the CNC function allows us to do, like I said, lettering, carving, cutting out parts. When we wanna change, what's gonna happen, is we're gonna take our Z up a little bit. Here, I've currently got a router bit installed and a quarter-inch collet. What'll happen is the router bit comes out. The head that we wanna use goes in, gonna do a few changes here, and then we'll come back and look at our laser setup. Our other modules, our other heads, like the laser module here are gonna simply go right into that quarter-inch collet. So the router bit is out. We insert that and then I would grab my collar wrench and make sure that this is nice and tight, so it's not gonna fall out of there. There, and our laser cord is gonna plug into our smart brain center over here to drive that. It's a four-watt laser, and that's gonna let us do work like this. This is about 20 minutes runtime in order to make that snowflake at four watts. What's cool about this. Laser engraving is just pretty darn neat. We can add your name to projects. You could make a name plate that you then apply to all your projects. If you're turning pens for somebody you could use a laser in order to put their name or a business name into the barrel of those wooden pens. So laser engraving can really add a lot to what you can do. In addition to doing laser engraving in wood, you can also put materials like leather under that laser, and do laser work on that. So very simple changeover. And again, we're just basically taking advantage of the same technology here that would drive the CNC, in order to drive our laser. To be really clear on this, when we're running the laser or the 3D printer, we're not running the router. We're only using the router as a mounting system to hold those in place. Next thing, we'll get the laser outta here 'cause I'm excited to show you the 3D printer too. For the 3D printing, what you can see here is the router is still in place. What happens in order to get enough Z-axis here, is this mounting block just gets turned upside down, then we use the router again as a carriage for the 3D printer. The printer itself, the head, is being fed off of this spool of filament. Now here on the machine, what happens as we do make another addition here, that's a glass plate. So we have a nice dead flat surface to do the printing on. The masking tape is gonna allow us to separate the 3D print from the glass when this is all done. So here in this Next Wave Automation, Piranha FX, we've got our CNC capabilities, laser capabilities, 3D printing capabilities. One of the things I think is really cool about the possibilities of 3D printing in the shop, would be to print a prototype instead of building a prototype. So wouldn't it be cool if you could print the coffee table you were about to build, check out all the proportions, check out the dimensions, make sure the scale of it is okay before you start cutting the first stick of wood. A lot of stuff under one roof from this machine, and that's why it caught my eye at AWFS.